What astonishes me, is how often poor people go eating in a restaurant (e.g. breakfast in the first paragraph) when making breakfast at home (or lunch) is so much cheaper (as a fun exercise we often calculate the prices of our home lunch). Although I have a nice income, 80% of the time I bring my own food to work because restaurants are too expensive in my opinion to regularly use them. As a side note: I have the sus…
To make food at home, you either need fresh, perishable ingredients and/or time to prep and cook. Even accessing fresh ingredients may be a hassle (see: food deserts), so eating off the dollar menu often feels like a better use of your money than making the trek to the grocery store to buy some perishables that you then have to cook before they go bad. It's similar to why poor people buy poor-quality shoes more often…
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play